Summary
A research issue in legal linguistics is whether a satisfactory definition of “hate” can be achieved. The term “hate crime” has been deployed so that criminal law can take the side of an individual who is vulnerable because of a protected characteristic, such as a learning difficulty. A short dictionary entry for “hate” can be given, but it overlaps with several near synonyms, the physiology is unknown and the time course is not specified. If physiological arousal is high and the duration is short, the word “anger” might be used informally. “Anger” is very well understood scientifically but hardly figures in law. The science of the sympathetic adrenal medullary system, which has evolved to prepare the body for action in the face of severe threats of short duration, will be described in detail. A lexicological analysis of various nouns for emotion and motive is presented.
Legal cases published by the Community Security Trust in the UK is a possible source for analysis for the presence of hate and anger.
Hate crime – lexicology
Courts very frequently adjudicate on whether utterances constitute a “hate crime” intended to protect five classes of people. The CPS reports 9,245 “racial” cases out of 12,737 hate crime offences. The CPS does not define “hate” but uses an “everyday understanding”. The legal is principle that “the legal meaning is the same as the ordinary meaning” (Slocum (2017). We first need a lexicological analysis, starting with the noun.
| Hate | to dislike intensely; to imagine humiliation or harm; death is possible to treat as an enemy; to disable military, but accept PoWs antonym “love” |
| Ill-will | near synonym, plus a grudge, dislike, spiteful attitude |
| Antagonism | near synonym; new synonym antipathy, implying without evidence |
| Spite | near synonym, plus desire to thwart or irritate |
| Contempt | implies a position of superiority; adds scorn |
| Prejudice | implies the absence of evidence |
| Unfriendliness | less intense, unless in war |
| Resentment | less intense; acceptable as a voting attitudes |
| Dislike | low intensity, synonym preference |
“Hate”, verb and noun, found in all Germanic languages, derived ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *keh₂d- (“strong emotion”).
“Heinous” from Old French haïneus/ haïr – “to hate”, archaic adjective word. So a “heinous crime” appears to mean that “hate crime is heinous”, appears to mean “hate crime is hateful and should be hated”.
Physiology is not specified. The antonym “love” is associated with Oxytocin. Time course is not specified, appears constant
Anger
This emotion is very well described in psychological science. The physiology is that of the sympathetic adrenal medullary system (SAMS), The Sympathetic branch of the Autonomic Nervous System reacts quickly, 0.25 secs. The hormone Adrenaline has to circulate, 0.25 minutes Old in evolutionary terms; the brain stem or “reptilian brain” is strongly evolved. Its behavioural function is the fight/ flight system, for immediate threats to life. The “triune brain” (MacLean, 1990) is only moderately confirmed, so it is a metaphor here.
Rage is self-limiting. It involves a high level of glucose consumption, so its duration is a few tens of minutes, replaced by exhaustion.
The metaphor “hot blood” might be better described as “high SAM arousal”. “Cold blood”, or “low SAM arousal” in the saying “revenge is a dish best served cold” is from Pashtunwala.
Fear and anger are paired emotions: both involve SAM; they differ in approach vs avoidance and at the cognitive level in appraisal of the adversary weaker/ stronger.
Reptilian brain processing for predator encounters are now rare. Several surfers have escaped a shark attack by punching it in the eye. “Road rage” seems to bypass the feeling and thinking brain
The Limbic (or Mammalian brain) can dominate during bonding, grief and perhaps tribal behaviour – see below for football supporters. Babies faces induce oxytocin release from the pituitary. A bereaved person may rage at the deceased, or at God.
Narcissistic rage is usual and episodic in the years 2 to 4. See attention-seeking in the CST database below
Law involves strictly neocortical/ forebrain/ rational processing. Utterances are processed semantically. However, pragmatic analysis is requited to the speaker’s intention in cases of irony, hyperbole and perhaps territoriality. Irony gives text its opposite meaning, c.f. the Trotsky telegram. Hyperbole is recognised in “I’ll kill him if walks on my carpet in muddy boots”.
The Sympathetic Adrenal Medullary System
The diagram shows a descending signal from the hypothalamus activating the organs on the right. There is an antagonistic system called the parasympathetic which returns the body to relaxation and digestion.
The sympathetic adrenal medulla medullary system prepares the body for urgent action, usually simplified as “Fight or Flight”. Sympathetic nerves descend from the brain and have very rapid effects on end organs. The second component of SAM is the adrenal medulla, well known as the gland producing the hormone adrenaline. This hormone has the same effect as the sympathetic nerves, but its time scale is of the order of a quarter of a minute whereas the nerves have their effects in a quarter of a second. If the senses detect a threat, the hypothalamus in the brain sends a message through the sympathetic nerves. Hearing and vision become more alert, but the biggest effects are to the heart and lungs: pulse and breathing rate increase very rapidly. This is appropriate in anticipation of urgent action, although a pounding heart can feel alien if we do not understand it. Sweating increases, in case the brain has to be kept cool while fighting or running. This too may be felt as alien – a “cold wave” or “someone walking over my grave”. Digestion shuts down, so the mouth feels dry and the small intestines may be felt as “knotted” or “butterflies”. In extreme arousal the bowel or bladder may release involuntarily. Consciousness of gut functions is one of the signs that discriminates anger from fear. The metaphor “to have guts” means to have no conscious awareness of gut action, so that the “fight” prevails. Terror and rage have a short duration because they are very exhausting. In healthcare, panic can be treated using this principle of “flooding”, because the extreme energy demands of panic must give way to exhaustion after an hour or two. So anger is self-limiting, unlike hate.
The fight/ flight system evolved to prepare the animal for threats to life. The flight response is effective for deer, while a third F, “freezing”, is effective for partridge. Humans cannot hope to outrun most predators, so an aggressive bluff may be a better option. Threats to life are now a rare experience for humans, but still happen occasionally to surfers during shark attack. If you were astride a board in Hawaiian surf and felt a sharp pain in the leg and looked down to see a great white shark, what would you do? Answer: punch it in the eye. Such responses are often reported at vice.com. There is a fourth “F”, for which the euphemism “fornication” may be used, to indicate that the sympathetic adrenal medullary system is also active during sex.
Hate and Anger in Community Security Trust cases
The CST published a database of prosecutions which were brought before a court in England and Wales. The 40 cases up to 2019 were examined as hate crimes based on the protected characteristic race. No reference to religion was found. In practice more than half of Israelis and those choosing the ethnonym “Jew” for UK census purposes are non-believers.
Hate based on presumed race and religious belief. Utterances by a person with articulated long-term theories about Jews in a relatively low-arousal (“cold-blooded”) way.
Example: Alison Chabloz, a far-right blogger and musician, was convicted at Westminster Magistrates Court of writing and performing antisemitic songs which denied the Holocaust, at a meeting of the London Forum and which she posted to YouTube. She was convicted of two counts of sending an offensive, indecent or menacing message through a public communications network, and a third charge relating to one of three songs on YouTube. She was sentenced to 20 weeks imprisonment, suspended for two years, banned from posting anything on social media for 12 months, and has to complete 180 hours of unpaid community work.
Denigrations. 20%. Utterances made in high arousal (“hot-blooded”), which denigrated a CST client using various swear words including the J* word but without articulated theories or references to Nazis.
Example. Two teenagers pleaded guilty to racially/religiously aggravated public order and assault at Medway Magistrates Court after they threw stones at a Jewish family on Minster beach in Kent and shouted “Jews” at them. They were sentenced to a Youth Rehabilitation Order for 12 months, 160 hours of unpaid work, supervision by the Probation Service for 12 months and a curfew for four months.
Hitler salutes. (25%). Denigrations accompanied by one instance of the straight-armed salute adopted from Rome by Nazis were the most frequent cause for prosecution. In every case it would be ambiguous whether the speaker is saying “you are a Nazi” or “I am a Nazi”. Many show characteristics of white tribalist football supporters making territorial challenges.
Example. Joseph Brogan, a 27-year-old from Gorton, pleaded guilty to a racially aggravated public order offence and was jailed for six months. Brogan gave a Nazi salute and shouted antisemitic abuse at a rally against antisemitism in Manchester city centre in September 2018. He was sentenced at Manchester Crown Court Nov 18.
White tribalist. 10%. Utterances over several occasions by electronic means showing signs of high arousal denigrating and expressing fantasies of harm to Muslims, Jews and other minorities.
Example. Jonathan Jennings, a 34-year-old from Brynamman in Wales, pleaded guilty at Swansea Crown Court to 10 counts of publishing threatening written material to stir up religious hatred, sending an electronic communication conveying a threatening message, and sending an electronic communication of an offensive nature. Jennings posted messages on the social media site Gab targeting Muslims, Jews and public figures. He posted that it would be “a good idea” if there was a “burn a mosque day”, “Muslims should be gassed” and “Hitler was born 100 years too soon”. He threatened that if the Jews did not behave themselves they would share the same fate as Muslims. Jennings was jailed for 16 months in Aug 18.
Islamist: 15%. Plans of Islamic radicals discovered by police, suspects assumed to be in low arousal.
Example. Ummarayiat Mirza, 21-years-old, and his wife Madihah Taheer, 22-years-old, were convicted of planning a terror attack in Birmingham. Zainub Mirza, Ummarayiat’s 24-year-old sister, admitted sending terrorist propaganda videos to her brother. They had been planning a knife attack and had carried out online hostile reconnaissance of possible targets, including Birmingham’s Central Synagogue, Wikipedia lists of Jewish communities in Britain, Jewish areas in London and Birmingham, barracks and Territorial Army bases in Birmingham. As well as the online research, Ummariyat bought a steel hunting knife and a rubber training knife, which he used to practice on a training dummy. Ummarayiat Mirza pleaded guilty to preparing an act of terrorism and was jailed for 21 years. Madihah Taheer was found guilty of preparing an act of terrorism and was jailed for 11 years. Zainub pleaded guilty to five counts of disseminating terrorist publications and was jailed for 30 months. Dec 17.
Attention-seeking. 10% A solitary person in high arousal making derogations to an imagined remote audience e.g. Twitter/ X.
Example. David Bitton, a 40-year-old from Altrincham, was jailed for four years in Feb 18 after pleading guilty to 13 separate charges of sending racist and threatening communication. Bitton tweeted around 600 posts on Twitter over the course of one weekend in May 2016, many directed at Greater Manchester Police and many others making racist, homophobic and antisemitic comments and being highly abusive. In the police interview, Bitton claimed he had only written the tweets in order to gain followers and deleted them soon after.
The approach of Heinz Kohut (2009) to anger should be mentioned here, as it gives an account of “narcissistic rage” as a normal phase of infant development. Children may recapitulate some of our evolutionary prehistory, a principle sometimes stated as “ontogeny reproduces phylogeny”. Psychoanalytic ideas about the experience of the infant are hard to process, but the temper tantrums of children around age four will be familiar to parents. A typical scenario involves the child wanting something such as an ice cream or a new toy, which the parent refuses. The child reacts by screaming, and perhaps by throwing itself down and even banging its head against the hard floor. A considered parental response involves waiting for a break in the screaming, then soothing the child as opportunity arises, without directly yielding to the demand. The parental task of helping the child to constrain desire and slowly adjust to social demands is referred to as “disillusioning the child gradually”. Tantrums in public places are of course very embarrassing to parents who may react too strongly, but this leaves a residue in terms of “narcissistic vulnerability”. Elsewhere I ask “Is MAGA vulnerable narcissism?”
Political. 10%. A number of CST clients had complained about an adversary in public political discussion, where arousal was moderately high, but no denigrations or racist attributions by the adversary were reported. These might be considered a difference of opinion between equals, but the court opted to take the viewpoint of the CST client and imposed fines.
Example. Alister William Coutts was found guilty of acting in a racially aggravated manner with intent to cause distress and alarm at Aberdeen Sheriff Court and was fined £175. Coutts, a member of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, was convicted for his behaviour towards a Jewish businessman, who operated stalls selling Israeli cosmetics in a Glasgow shopping centre. Aug 17.
Mammalian level processing in football supporters
Understanding of the mammalian (middle) level is best achieved through study of our nearest relatives – chimpanzees and bonobos. Acceptance within a primate group may involve scents and bodily signs of submission or dominance such as height and offer of grooming. Hostility to outgroup individuals becomes intense if these cues are not found. The reproductive urge has by now expanded to long-term bonds with infants, mediated by the hormone oxytocin. Long-term pair bonds have developed in many mammals. Communication in chimps includes these facial expressions: bared teeth (which is actually friendly, and might need to be viewed by us as smiling), play face, scream, whimper, and pout (Parr and Waller, 2006). Aggressive communications include the “full closed grin”, the “sneer” and “swaggering bipedally” (hunched over and arms waving, in an attempt to exaggerate one’s size). Pant-hoot is a four part call that shows status and maintains the group when hunting. Dominance is shown by accepting offers of grooming and submission to a high status male by offering grooming. War-band behaviours include screaming and beating the ground. Fighting is a high risk strategy, so ritual displays such as the power walk are used, better seen in gorillas. A complex troupe can be held together by such communication, though breakdowns occur. Chimps can resort to murder, illustrated by the “Gombe chimpanzee war”.
In human prehistory hunter-gatherer bands were typically 150 people. This is Dunbar’s (1993) number, which is about the maximum for every individual to know the identity and social role of every other. Living in much groups larger than 150 became possible because the neocortex allowed leadership and status to be mental abstractions, such as a rarely-seen king or sultan, distant ideas such as government, or the God of monotheistic religions. Groups of people may revert to a tribal level of function and paleomammalian processing if trust in these abstractions breaks down. Football supporters’ groups have often been reported as showing tribal behaviour with affinity to the in-group and hostility to people who are visibly different. Challenges over territory are mammalian but then recruit the reptilian fight/ flight level of the brain.
The “English disease” in the 1970s gave an early model which was widely copied, especially in Russia. A “firm” shared a geographic identity centred on its “end” of pitch. This identity was usually “white” and initially hostile to Afro-Caribbean players. Chanting was essential and comparisons with pant-hoot could be made. Milwall was famous for its hooligans, but so was Cardiff in Wales, while Glasgow in Scotland had two ethnically-defined tribal identities. There have been predictable clashes between supporters of teams associated with Serbs, Bosniaks and Croatians, but football violence needs no previous ethnic boundaries and has occurred in many countries. The football game may be seen as an activity of the neocortex, to ritualise ethnic hostility, with complex ideas like penalties, warning cards, the offside rule and video assistant referee. The behaviour of a soccer firm may operate at a mammalian level like a chimp war band: “full closed grin” is like “who d’you think you’re looking at?”; “sneer” is a denigration; “beating the ground” might be compared with a Nazi salute.
The approach to neo-Nazis of Simi (2017) considers that violent individuals seek far right contexts and he uses these terms “addicted to hate” and “far-right extremism”. By contrast, Clifford Stott (2017) regards crowd behaviour as the proper object of study, rather than “a few troublemakers” approach. He argues that police should engage with crowd members as they gather, rather than wait until the police think shields and batons are necessary. By that stage crowd members will see the police as illegitimate hostile forces seeking to deprive them of political rights. The tribal group as the proper object of study is the approach taken in this paper.
The use of denigrations, taunts and provocations in tribal behaviour need to be considered. Denigrations are verbal utterances that seek to lower the status of the interlocutor. Many refer to bodily functions including depraved sex or elimination, but their effect of curses is largely unrelated to their semantics. Swear words studied by Berger (2016) usually finished on a closed syllable and this may be the main characteristic of a swear word. These final consonants are mostly what linguists call plosives, which means the air stream is totally obstructed for a moment then dramatically released. The F* word is the most frequent and its effect is like the expiratory snort of an angry bull. Berger reported that 29 of the 84 swear words had four letters. If the speaker and interlocutor have no audience, the interlocutor’s first two options are to reply verbally or to withdraw (flight), implicitly accepting their inferior position. A third option is to progress to a physical fight, though this may give the first party an advantage.
Pragmatic and semantic analyses of utterances compared
Rather than an elaborate presentation of pragmatic theory, two practical approaches will be illustrated: speech therapy for autism; and Jewish humour. The autistic spectrum usually includes a pragmatic disorder. An influential theory of it that of Baron-Cohen (2008), who says that autistic people “do not have a theory of mind”. Therapy involves painstaking attempts to reduce the autist’s terror of other people guidance and guide them about idioms, turn-taking, and ways of inferring other people’s thoughts. This is also the purpose of the present article.
The “Trotsky telegram” (Berger, 1977) is an often-quoted instance of how speakers’ communicative intentions can be the opposite of the literal meaning of the written version of what they say. Stalin receives a telegram from Trotsky. which reads:
“Joseph Stalin, The Kremlin, Moscow. ‘You were right and I was wrong. You are the true heir of Lenin. I should apologise. Leon Trotsky’.”
However, a Jewish tailor says it was read without the right feeling. The clue to the audience here is that a Jewish joke is coming up. The reader must supply their best attempt at a Yiddish accent, stressing the pronoun at the beginning and finishing with a rising querulous tone. It then reads as follows:
” You were right and I was wrong? You are the true heir of Lenin? I should apologise?”
References
Slocum, Brian G. (2017) The Pragmatic Turn in Law: Inference and Interpretation in Legal Discourse. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2873883
Conduit, E. (2020) The Sexism of Transitive Verbs in Legal Process. Int. Journal of Law, Language & Discourse, 1 Sept 2020. https://www.elejournals.com/ijlld/ijlld-8-1-2020
Conduit, E. (2024). Is MAGA vulnerable narcissism? https://www.multiresearchjournal.com/admin/uploads/archives/archive-1719306048.pdf
Crown Prosecution Service web site. Hate crime.
Bergen N K. (2016) The Science of Swear Words (Warning: NSFW AF). Basic Books,
http://www.wired.com/2016/09/science-swear-words-warning-nsfw-af/
MacLean, Paul D. (1990) The Triune Brain in Evolution.
Parr, L. and Waller,B. (2006) Understanding chimpanzee facial expression: insights into the evolution of communication. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. Dec; 1(3): 221–228. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsl031
Simi, P. Blee,K. DeMichele, M. (2017) Addicted to Hate: Identity Residual among Former White Supremacists. American Sociological Review. August 29, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122417728719
Dunbar, R.I.M. (1993). “Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 16 (4): 681–735. doi:10.1017/s0140525x00032325.
Kohut,H. (2009) The analysis of the self.